‘My son has died’: Russia mourns loss of first drafted soldiers in UkraineAs newly mobilised men return from the front in coffins, critics complain of aggressive recruiting, low morale and poor trainingAndrew Roth | 15 Oct 2022 | 10.24 EDTNewly mobilised Russian recruits at a railway station in Prudboi, Volgograd region, 29 September. Photograph: APAndrei Nikiforov, a lawyer from St Petersburg, was one of the hundreds of thousands of Russians mobilised since last month to hold the frontlines in his country’s faltering war in Ukraine.
On 25 September he received his call-up papers. By 7 October, just two weeks later, he was dead.
“We don’t know what happened,” said Alexander Zelensky, the head of the Nevsky Collegium of Lawyers, of which Nikiforov was a member. Zelensky and a member of Nikiforov’s family confirmed his call-up and death. “All we have is a date and a place.”
That place was Lysychansk, one of the most dangerous spots near the frontlines.
The first coffins are now returning to Russia from Ukraine, bringing the remains of ordinary Russians who at first were promised a quick “special military operation” and now have been drafted to go and fight in a war. Their deaths may mark another inflection point for Russia in this conflict, where mismanagement has led to Kremlin infighting and at least half a million men have been drafted or fled their homes to avoid it.
The newly minted soldiers died within weeks of Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation announcement on 21 September. On Thursday, the Chelyabinsk region announced the deaths of five mobilised soldiers from a single military commissariat. Reports on Saturday said that another four had died from the Krasnoyarsk region alone. Family members of some men who died said they had been promised two months of training before they would be sent to the frontlines.
According to BBC Russian, another 14 have died, even before reaching the front, of causes including suicide, heart attacks, in fights and other mysterious ailments. . .
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/15/my-son-has-died-russia-mourns-loss-of-first-drafted-soldiers-in-ukraine